LegalBagel

Especially when those most of those lifetime appointments were made with the intent of lasting for decades by office-holders elected by a minority of the population.

And I would agree with you that the United States government, as it exists now, is not a functioning democracy. There are too many giant flaws in the structure of the overall government, how we allocate power, and our institutions themselves. We're hitting an inflection point where insane levels of partisanship, geographic, racial, and educational sorting that exacerbate the flaws in our government, increasing willingness to toss ahead long-standing norms about how to govern properly, and (in particular) a party without popular support that is committed to maintaining power through minority rule. Power doesn't reflect the popular will, at all, and even when a party actually wins significant power, it's impossible to get anything done.

But I don't accept that there isn't a functioning democracy that couldn't government the United States. It's going to require some radical rethinking of our democracy though. Smaller, immediate things like tossing aside the filibuster and allowing parties that win power to actually do something (and be judged on doing it) and passing voting rights acts with teeth that actually support proper enfranchisement of people in each state. And giant things like ensuring popular vote-driven elections, admitting additional states (DC and Puerto Rico) that will help mitigate the insane rural/urban divide in power that exists in the Senate now, and rethinking the formation and membership of the Supreme Court.

Lots of stuff that needs to be done immediately (assuming Democrats win power and can do so), lots of other stuff that are long-term goals that will require years of action or constitutional amendments. It's not impossible to govern the United States, but it's impossible with the government and leadership we have now.

Put a ton of hours in this week, currently mid-way through unlocking the 3rd shortcut and have gotten to world 6(?), but haven't seen any ending stuff yet. Undecided if I like this more or less than the previous game.

I completely hate the first area with how much of a nightmare the moles and yellow sonic spin guys are to deal with in most circumstances, so it has put me off trying to do full runs - I feel like I die way more and have way less fun in the Caves than any other area. I've certainly learned how to deal with those enemies better, but for an opening area where you're low on health and resources they are mean.

Also in general the amount of not only instant-death or run-ending mechanics they've added in (curse, poison, LONG stuns on hits), really up the punishing factor in the game from what I remember of the first one. Doesn't help that there are some really nasty spawns the RNG can generate with the new enemies and tiles.

I've developed some strategies and am certainly getting better over time, but from what I've seen so far I don't know if I'll dedicate myself to trying to see everything or get to the ending the way I did the first one.

So, after putting another 3-4 nights into it and reaching the last mission of the relatively short campaign, I'm a lot more lukewarm and feel the need to rant with how much the game has been annoying me. The campaign and gameplay remain pretty strong, and there are still a bunch of great campaign moments and a few great custom missions.

But there is also a ton of the live service stuff on top such that the actual story-based campaign that remains is extremely watered down. I can't help being disappointed that I'm going to end the campaign (and likely my time with the game) when a huge chunk of my character's skills and upgrade options are still locked up. And in general the amount of complaints I have about the service game stuff are legion - it's baffling that a game can still be this badly designed after 10+ years of these games being released and improved, which makes it all the worse that it hurts the campaign so badly:

• Collecting daily quests or checking faction vendors requires you to jump to two different zones and walk the length of those zones to do everything. For what is supposed to be a daily activity, it takes almost 10-15 minutes just to get setup to run quests efficiently. It's nonsense. If I'm playing an hour or two a night, losing a huge chunk of time to "setup" is unacceptable. Especially once you add on the fact that the game doesn't play well with suspending, so I'll usually have to load the game up from scratch each time.
• You have (multiple!) vendors in each social zone that sell things for your entire cast of characters. It's annoying by itself, but made worse by the fact that the "compare loot" feature shows your current character instead of the character that would equip the loot. So you have no way of knowing if loot is an upgrade for the character you aren't playing as.
• You also have no way of easily swapping characters to check gear in social spaces and, even worse, you have no way to use most of your characters in the different social spaces for most of the campaign. Maybe some of that gets fixed post-campaign, but right now it feels broken that basically I can't effectively use vendors for most of my characters.
• You can collectively hold a ton of items in your stash, but individually you can only hold 9 items in an equipment slot. If you run a couple missions as a character, you'll almost certainly fill up at least one of those stashes, requiring you to do some inventory management to avoid things getting dumped into yet another inventory stash.
• There is no way to easily tag/dismantle items, and they instead subscribe to the miserable Assassin's Creed system of target each item and hold a button for several seconds to dismantle. So there's again another few minutes of tedium loot management between every 1-2 missions.
• Loot doesn't appear meaningful, at least for the time I've played so far. Even the couple high-tier items I've found aren't really all that great. Usually it just seems like I should focus on pushing that power number up and maxing out green arrows as much as possible.
• The UI and screen are often filled with blinking warning text telling you to equip something, upgrade something, or retrieve something that are incredibly distracting. Sometimes even telling you to do that when a) you've already checked loot and done what you want to do or b) flashing up text telling you to go to a vendor that you can't even access at that time.
• The cost for both in-game currency cosmetics and pay cosmetics are insane. After nearly finishing the entire campaign, I still don't have enough to unlock even a low-tier outfit, let alone one of the unique outfits. I get that is supposed to be part of the long-tail grind and where they make their money, but after 15-20 hours the idea that I'm not even close to getting any new cosmetics beyond the story-granted ones is crazy.

Overall I can't help just comparing it to something like Spiderman and coming away profoundly disappointed that a potentially awesome campaign and mix of brawler gameplay styles was subsumed by the live service game they had to make. If this game was properly balanced for the campaign in terms of skills, leveling, and gameplay, added in an extra mission or two per character focusing on their unique traits in the back half, and removed all of the loot crap, then they would have made a pretty damn awesome Avengers game.

I'm sure they'll fix most of the badly designed live service features, and maybe they'll add more unique content with the new characters, but for now it just feels like a huge missed opportunity.

Edit: And to complete the rant, I finished the campaign last night (which actually has a really good finale), opened up the post-campaign objectives and decided to try some of the sidequests. Now I'm hitting a consistent crashing bug no matter what mission I pick. No way around it that I can see. At least it happened after I finished the campaign. But the game turning completely unplayable after I move out of the campaign is a perfect metaphor for my overall feeling on the game.

Really enjoying the campaign as well. The initial intro with the non-MCU faces/voices was rough, but once you get into it you get a lot more used to the slightly different spin on the characters (especially with Ms. Marvel there to improve everything). You get some cookie-cutter missions, but there's enough targeted missions for each character and fun scenes that it makes it all work.

On the other hand, so far I've liked absolutely nothing about the live service aspects of the game. Loot feels like a chore to upkeep and it feels like there is no satisfying progression there. The menus are all a chore to navigate and missing a ton of basic QoL features. The repeatable / open areas of the game are all incredibly boring, and it often feels like you get close to nothing from a lot of the missions progression-wise. They throw you off the deep end with vendors/resources/missions with very little insight on best practices for using everything. It all generally detracts from the main campaign.

I'm looking forward to playing through the rest of the campaign, but it feels like the odds of me sticking with the game long-term are nil. Hopefully they'll keep dropping little new story bits or mini-character campaigns. Or hopefully they'll fix the live service aspects over time to make them less miserable.

Monster Train for me. As someone who has put 300+ hours into Slay the Spire, having a new game with similar structure but very different strategy and gameplay has been great to go through. Have already spent 50 hours in it since it came out and worked my way up the covenant levels.

I have a feeling it may not stick with me long-term, which may get it replaced on the top of the list, but for now I'm still deep in the throes of jamming out runs on a regular basis.

I am really undecided on this. I'm about 4 missions in playing on ultraviolent, so far sticking to difficulty despite it kicking my ass in basically every encounter until I learn the arena and figure out a strategy. I still love the combat flow and the feeling of finally nailing an encounter, which usually involves several near-death recoveries and a half dozen key shots. But damn it is hard. 20-30+ minutes to finish any of the big fights.

But even loving the combat I think they added 3 or 4 too many things to it. If they had just focused in on the weapon mods, weak spots, and limiting ammo to encourage weapon cycle for different enemy types, it feels like that would have been enough. But add on separate cooldowns/mods for grenades, a separate cooldown for flame belch, and a meter you build up for "blood punch" (when otherwise your melee does absolutely nothing), and you're managing way too much stuff in combat. Switching between rifle to shoot out an archnotron cannon, lock-on rockets to shoot down a revenant, and plasma rifle to blow up a shield-all while racing at full speed-is enough fun and challenge to me. I don't want to also be tracking three different cooldown/meters all of which are useful to keep an eye on.

And everything outside of the combat seems worse. The five+ different upgrade/collectible systems just seems like a lot to pile on a game that's already mechanically dense. The story is just utterly nonsensical hardcore Doom lore, and not in a fun way. They've dropped the campy hell corporation, over-the-top doomguy from the first game in favor of some decidely B-tier (and completely unexplained) deep mythos for the Doom world. There's sparks of the humor in the first game, but they seem trying too hard to recapture that in a very knowing way through things like the ridiculous broadcasts talking about the "doomguy". And the platforming is just bad - in combat the movement is fun, out of combat with the extremely game-y climbing/dashing/jumping puzzles it is atrocious.

I will say they did make some nice quality of life changes. Much easier to get back into old missions to find collectibles, you can slap on cheats you find pretty easily and still play through most of the game, and loading is very quick for a graphically dense console game (which is a necessity when you're dying 10+ times an encounter).

1. Outer Wilds

2. Apex Legends

3. Control

4. Outer Worlds

5. Sekiro

6. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

7. Luigi's Mansion 3

8. Tetris 99

Glad Austin will be able to move on and try to balance things out better. He's had lots of creative things out there that have all been generally amazing (in addition to a great tenure at GB), so I'm sure we'll have some great stuff to come for him. Friends at the Table continues to be amazing and I always appreciate hearing his perspective on pretty much everything. But have to feel for him with how Waypoint turned out.

Reading between the lines on everything they've said on the site and other comments that have been made, things never really came together (both in terms of how they envisioned the site and in the larger Vice ecosystem). They were shifting styles and trying out different approaches fairly often to try to draw in an audience, and from what Austin has revealed their bigger projects like the intersection between gaming and incarceration basically got them nothing in traffic. And for the last year or so it certainly seems like their runway ran out and Vice basically just wanted to reduce back down to some basic gaming/culture coverage.

Just weighing in on the major "should I skip" or "should I start this game" questions that most people ask, from someone who just made it into Heavensward. Overall, I recommend people do play through everything, but you should definitely know what you're getting into. Rushing into the expansions seems like it will leave you very much lost in terms of story/world/gameplay, and there's no way I'd be into the game as much as I am now if I didn't play through the base game.

Pros:

Most of the major story content is relatively good as far as MMOs go. As someone coming from WoW as my only prior MMO experience, I came away liking the main questlines and major encounters. The ramp is slow, but it helps you get into your character, your skills, MMO group combat, and the world in general. Side quests and inbetween filler was very weak, but the main story was good once it picked up, and the dungeons/bosses were fun throughout.

You get great introductions to the cast of characters and areas through the content. I wouldn't be nearly as excited to play Heavensward without having played through the ARR and post-ARR quests, nor as invested in all the characters. The quests that familiarize you with the cities/factions are dull, but also pretty necessary to avoid getting dumped into the world. Don't be afraid to teleport and use your mount to get through the travel as quickly as possible.

The systems to encourage veterans to play through old content work. I never had more than a 10-15 minute wait for running the required dungeons and boss encounters, even as a DPS. The specific story-required roulette in particular is really smart, as it lets you watch cutscenes for the major dungeons without feeling like you're leaving the group behind. Otherwise I made sure to go into a dungeon prepped and never had a problem romping through with a pick-up group. And it felt like the right level of challenge ramp for each encounter, even if I was largely being carried along.

Cons:

It is as long as people say. It took me 120 hours to get through ARR and the post-ARR content. I dabbled, did lots of side quests, tried out jobs and all for the first 40 hours, but the rest were pretty much mainlining MSQs, unlock quests, and roulettes for needed leveling. It probably took me 70 hours to go from level 25-Heavensward alone. I didn't hit many leveling walls, but in general it was just a lot of time, with a lot of unneeded busywork in there. For anything but dungeons/bosses/major story points you'll want some background noise.

Outside of the slow start, which I didn't mind because it was introducing me to the world and all the jobs/areas, there are a few major slogs of 5-10 hours of outright bad content. The pre-Titan questline, mid-40's leveling stretch, and initial post-ARR quests in particular are major roadblocks. I was lucky I had a rare free weekend day to burn through the Titan questline in particular, as if that had taken a full week of after-work playtime I might have dropped the game. It's odd because the dungeons and boss encounters were the primary things that I looked forward to early on, while the story becomes the main driver after level 40 or so. But on either front there are long stretches where neither happens. Once you get further on you get to a point where you unlock a lot of bosses/dungeons so you always have some things to try.

Yeah, there were several points when I almost quit the game after I spent several loops in a row re-doing activities to try to figure something out or waiting for things to happen. I'm sure they considered and discarded having more friendly options like fast-forward or a memory save state to let you retry things without wasting 10+ minutes, but it made it very easy to bounce off parts of the game (or to pretty much ruin the ending in my case).